Jane Eyre Laid Bare

Is a rewritefanfic shameless cash grab by a person called Eve Sinclair who merged Charlotte Bronte's classic with some ropy erotica in order to get a piece of the current fad for erotic romances and make Bronte more accessible to a modern audience make scads of cash from people who don't know any better.

The prospect of this was so laden with derp and rage that I felt it was only my duty to take one for the team and read it. Whenever I passed one of the ubiquitous adverts for it on the Tube or bus I fell into a screaming rage and alarmed fellow commuters by screaming "NO! NO! KILL IT WITH FIRE!" at the advert.

Executive Summary

Reader, I bumraped an all time classic.

A bit more detail, if you wouldn't mind, please?

It's Jane Eyre with sexy bits inserted hither and yon. The author basically just downloaded a Word file of it from the Gutenberg Project and started typing, probably while having one off the wrist at the same time. The result of this literary war crime is to not only be unreadable, flickering as it does between the sublime and the ridiculous, but also to completely derail the actual novel as a whole. I shall explain. Those of you who have read Jane Eyre will know her childhood is not a happy one, up at Lowood and being shamed for breaking a slate and being bullied by the other girls and so forth. Yet the author, within a few pages of beginning, inserts an interlude where Jane proceeds to recount how she and the other girls whiled away the days wanking themselves (and each other) senseless. Which completely defeats the whole thrust (drum fill) of that part of the novel. Terribad prose abounds as well. What? You want to see for yourself? Right ho then. Behold!

"I felt my sex warm in the sunlight through the window, opening like a flower, and my memory pulled me back to Emma and how I had braced against the desk, terrified and yet delighted in the shimmering dart of pleasure that she had ignited in me. How she'd spread me with her fingertips, holding back my damp, coiled pubic hair and lapped at me, and hwo the sound of my juices against her mouth had excited me beyond all measure until I had implored her and, grabbing my hips, she'd pressed her mouth against me, sucking me harder, pulling me into her."

What. Pubic hair. Did they refer to it as that in the 1840s? Probably not. Now you see how the shifts between the original and the "Improvements" are so jarring. Not only this, but it completely trashes the whole point of Jane's character. She was supposed to be all innocent and suchlike. This is the point of the novel. It's about her growth as a person and winning over Mr Rochester and his mad woman in the attic. To have Jane reminisce about her previous schoolgirl lesbionics is not only a total character defilement, but also just comes over as cheap and trashy and gratuitous and, worst of all, arse-pulled. Because this little interlude had no consequence for the entire rest of the novel. It was just thrown in for fanservice.

Then there's the bit where Mr Rochester's wife Bertha Mason is a dominatrix. No, really. This exists. And the bit where a former lover from Brazil is mentioned. Now you know how I mentioned the bit about the pubic hair? And this person from Brazil? Yep, you were right. Reader, he tries to convince her to denude her sex. Let's stop and think about that again. As far as I know, but I stand to be corrected, the idea of groinal topiary is comparatively recent and only dates back to when swimwear which left the entirety of the legs bare came in, so that one's bush wouldn't poke out the sides. So that's about the 1940s I'd guess. The idea of a Full Brazilian dates back to the development of the thong which was a lot after the 1840s because it wasn't until around the 1970s that materials technology had improved to make dental floss in your crevice anything other than deeply unpleasant. And the totally bald quim didn't really come into vogue until the late 1990s and the spread (drum fill) of easily accessible pr0n across the internets. (This is of course from a European perspective - in the Islamic world pube-shaving has been going on for longer as certain schools of thought over there require it. It's in one of the hadith collections.) More to the point, though, a full bush was, in the 19th century, considered deeply erotic. The reason Gustave Courbet's painting "L'origine du monde" was so shocking was because it showed her genitalia poking out from between big, thick thatch of fur. A totally bald genital was clinical and functional and unnatural, like a medical textbook.

You can see why I find this book so objectionable, now, surely.

Then there's the climax (drum fill) in which Jane and Edward do it on the back of a horse.

Now at this point, gentle readers, some of you may be saying that I'm only jealous because I didn't think to improve a classic novel like Jane Eyre with sexy bits and so forth. Well, you're wrong. The reason nobody has tried to do this before the abysmal hack that is responsible for this is because it's a fucking moronic idea. What's next? An erotic rewrite of "Far From the Madding Crowd" where, following the bit where Gabriel Oak punctures the bloat-suffering sheep with his special tool, he punctures Bathsheba Everdene with his blue-veined custard chucker? Or maybe "Fifty Shades of the Colour Purple"? Or perhaps there's someone out there who's written a raunchy prologue to "Midnight's Children" in which the spirit of Indian independence conceives them all in purple prose? Or a rewrite of "1984" in which Big Brother likes to watch?

(Note: do not do the above. Those are all equally stupid ideas and if you carry them out I will personally find out and attack you to death with a mechanical keyboard.)

In short, this is a fucking mess. Everyone responsible should be ashamed. It is the literary equivalent of pissing on the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial.